I was just thinking about my early days on an 8086 and a 386/33, and went to the vortex of wikipedia to read up on stuff. I started remembering Cyrix and VIA and the old computers I used to tinker around with from ages 8 to 15 or so. Playing Descent on a 33MHz 386 with no sound card and loving it. Playing Zork and some side-scroller monster truck game on an 8086. Borrowing a Zip drive from school and installing Linux on a 486 i scrounged, or my uncle gave me, until I put the processor in sideways and fried it. Oh, an excerpt that made me remember the giant computer catalogs I used to go through…Page. By. Page.

Although the company was short-lived and the brand name is no longer actively used by its current owner, Cyrix’s competition with Intel created the market for budget CPUs, which cut the average selling price of PCs and ultimately forced Intel to release its Celeron line of budget processors and cut the prices of its faster processors more quickly in order to compete.

Anyway. Things change quickly. Hooray for competition. All that jive.

No, I have no point. But I think I’ll forever remember that 386/33 DX with 4MB of RAM and the 60MB hd split into 2 partitions. And the AWESOME Pentium 75 with 16MB of RAM with the 1 GIGABYTE hard drive that I (drivespace? doublespace?)’d to 2GB that we got afterwards. and then my very first own computer, a P3 550MHZ (next to top of the line of 600!) with a gargantuan 256MB of ram! (my roommate had a faster and more expensive 600MHz P3, but only 128MB), 18GB hard drive, 19″ (!!!!!) monitor, DVD (!!!!) drive, creative soundblaster pro, and creative RIVA TNT2 card! hah. $2500+. I just had to look up my graphics card to remember details, so now I’ll include an excerpt:

The Creative3D Blaster TNT2 Ultra came clocked at the standard 150 MHz core and 183 MHz RAM. However, Creative included a unique software package that allowed the user to run software that used 3dfx‘s Glide.

And I remember my cousin’s husband-to-be frothing at the mouth over my planned rig, saying “you could run the internet with this!”

A long time ago ING Direct changed their login system so you have to click a link to login by keyboard – it defaults to clicking a number entry pad. This annoyed me. Right after they changed it I tried to make a GreaseMonkey script to fix it, which didn’t immediately work so I gave up.

So I wrote a tiny simple Google Chrome extension that changes to keyboard login and focuses the input box when you’re at the PIN page.

So – I couldn’t find any information about what tools I should buy to replace the pistol grip on my AR-15, so I just went to Sears and lucked out.

I went from the original to a Hogue monogrip.

Ok- I’m an AR-15 newbie, and I have no idea what’s the same on my gun versus what’s different on other guns – I thought they were all supposed to be the same, but just a disclaimer – I have no idea.

I replaced the pistol grip on my Bushmaster XM-15 model rifle – the BCWA3F14M4IZ to be exact – M4A3 with Izzy flash suppressor. I don’t know if Bushmaster does anything special to their pistol grips, but I’m not responsible if the directions don’t work for you.

I’d read that you use a Torx screwdriver to replace the grip, so that’s almost what I bought, but I got a combo kit instead.

The Torx wasn’t correct AT ALL – I used a hex head. According to the combo kit I got at Sears, I used an Imperial (not Metric) 3/16″ Hex Tamper Proof head – it fit perfectly, and there certainly wasn’t any stripping.

So that’s Three-Sixteenths of an inch – if you want to replace your Bushmaster XM-15 pistol grip, get a 3/16″ hex head screwdriver. I’m trying to get this onto all of Google’s search results so nobody ends up in the frustrating position I was in of not knowing what to get.

I don’t ever blog…not that I ever much did. Melina and I have a site at MelinaAndSteven.com that I sometimes try to post on when we’re travelling the world…but I can’t even manage to do that. I can’t even get pictures uploaded! I have tons of honeymoon pictures…Colorado…lots more wedding…anyway, there’s always tons of things to get done.

So I logged into this site to clean up the spammers that tried to get through, noticed there was a WordPress upgrade, noticed my ancient theme was broken, so decided to do some refreshing.

I noticed that my first post was November 23rd, 1999…so in 11 days it’ll be this site’s tenth birthday. I was running it on my one computer in my dorm room with a school-provided alias (I certainly couldn’t afford a domain name) on some terrible blogging software I wrote in Perl.

We went to my ten-year high school reunion a few weeks ago. Strangely fun to see what people had done with themselves…mostly stayed in Ringgold/Chattanooga and had a litter of kids, but there were some excellent surprises.

I can’t believe how much things have changed since then…how much I’ve changed since then.

In another decade I’ll be pushing 40! Hopefully it doesn’t come too quickly.

i’ve been able to contemplate about where my life is going, how i want it to go, and whom i’d like it to go with…which has been very enlightening…not that there’s any plan now, just that i know i’ve wasted a year of my personal life

I got a gargantuan raise at work, and i can now afford a house while still single with one income. i’m not sure if i’m going to get a house yet, and who knows how long i’ll be single, but at least the option is there now.

i’ve actually not been worrying really at all about being single…if i’m not supposed to be, then i won’t. if i’m supposed to be single, then there’s nothing i can force that could end up well.

i’ve been spending a lot of time with tasha, which has been fun – i’ll be sad when she moves to chicago in FIFTEEN WEEKS

i said that as if she reads this…i actually don’t know of anybody who does anymore, so…whatevers

way past my bedtime, i hope to make it into work before 10 more than twice this week…i’ll try 3 times. that is a challenge.

perhaps i will post again in another month and things will be even better…ha

Jeny came over yesterday and had a surprise of foodstuffs in a bag, which she then cooked for me. It was nice and delicious.

Saturday I went Christmas shopping for some hours. While I was out I went to all the stores with Wiis and asked when they were opening, did they have tickets, how many wiis were they getting, etc. I never want anything for Christmas but this year I finally decided I wanted a wii!

The fellow in the electronics department at target said they were handing out tickets at 7 am, opening at 8 am, and would have about 40 wiis. Since people were already camping at 3pm at best buy, target seemed like my best bet. I wanted to show up at 11 (closing), I ended up not making it until 12 or so. I was still #17 in line, so everything was good.

It was fairly warm for a December night, but still not the best 7 hours sitting on the sidewalk.

They came out at 7 am with 16 tickets for their 16 Wiis that they had to sell and sent everybody else packing.

#15 in line said that he worked at EB and wiis came in sets of 3 to the store, so I have no idea what happened to the other two that they should have received (funnily enough there were 18 of us at 7 am who had been there since midnight).

If you have Firefox 2.0 then you can install the Google Finance microsummary generator I just made. If you don’t know what that does, any time you bookmark a GFinance stock quote page (and probably put it on your bookmarks toolbar), it’ll let you choose in the bookmark dialog to show the “Live Title.” The live title updates itself every so often with the newest price for your stock.